On Sunday, Pete Buttigieg announced that he was quitting the Democrat primary race.  This was a surprise, given his announcement earlier in February that he had won the Iowa caucus. 

In his resignation speech, Buttigieg explained that his primary goal was "to help unify Americans to defeat Donald Trump."  He felt that the best way to achieve this goal would be to withdraw.

Watching his speech, one gets the impression that he may have been pressured to withdraw to allow more moderate Democrats to consolidate around Biden.  (Buttigieg is not a moderate; he is simply a Fabian, meaning he wishes to achieve full socialism by slower means than Bernie Sanders proposes.)

.@PeteButtigieg: "I am making the difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency. I will no longer seek to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, but I will do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January." pic.twitter.com/pbDXsWwFPZ

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 2, 2020

Buttigieg's campaign has always been unusual.  On paper, the 38-year-old candidate never offered any accomplishments that would justify elevating him to the highest office in America and the most important position in the world.  Here are the highlights from Buttigieg's résumé:

Buttigieg was a good student who eventually received a Rhodes Scholarship.

Buttigieg held a variety of low-level white-collar jobs, both after Harvard and after Oxford.  The job at which he stayed longest was as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, analyzing various companies to recommend courses of action to increase profitability.

Inspired by John Kerry, Buttigieg enlisted in the Naval Reserve.  He was an intelligence officer but concedes that he mostly drove a jeep and sat around reading and smoking cigars.  Although he used the experience to claim he had the makings of a commander in chief, both his path to being an officer and his responsibilities while on duty do not impress other veterans.

Buttigieg successfully ran for mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city of slightly over 101,000 people.  Out of the 14,883 people who voted, Buttigieg got 10,991 votes.  He was re-elected in 2015, receiving 8,515 votes.

Although South Bend is the 306th largest city in America, it ranks 69th in a list of America's most dangerous cities.  Both its violent crime and property crime rates are almost twice the U.S. average.  That did not change under Buttigieg's watch.

Buttigieg's accomplishments as mayor were limited.  Among other things, he fired his black police chief, gentrified black neighborhoods, initiated a laser light show, came out as gay, worked on an initiative to make streets more user-friendly, and helped residents make "green" repairs on their homes.

The Buttigieg mayoralty had a pattern: Buttigieg's penny-ante stuff mostly went through while he struggled with larger initiatives, whether they passed or not.  South Bend's Deep State resisted re-organization, and when Buttigieg was successful in pushing through urban redevelopment, his plans displaced minority communities.

Buttigieg's one other attribute is a sonorous voice that allows him to make vapid platitudes sound meaningful at the moment they're uttered.

This is not presidential timber.  Yet Buttigieg did well, surviving in the Democrat primaries long after other, arguably more accomplished, competitors failed.  His success reveals the dead end that is Democrat identity politics.

In 2008, Barack Obama was as lacking in accomplishments as Buttigieg.  However, Obama's election represented the promise of healing a deep wound in America's psyche and its founding sin — namely, the fact that a "nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" nevertheless allowed slavery to exist for 80 years after its inception and then allowed racial discrimination to continue for another 80 years.

Homosexuality is not in the same class.  While homosexuals have been subject to legislative and social discrimination, that is not a uniquely America sin.  It's just one of many societal issues that's been the subject of evolution in the Western world.  Buttigieg's ascension to the White House would not have promised to heal a uniquely American wound.

But Buttigieg still succeeded, proving that, when it comes to identity politics, being gay is all that's left to the left.  Ironically enough, when a truly accomplished man who happens to be gay, as is the case with Richard Grenell, was raised to some of the highest offices in the land, the left didn't celebrate his sexual orientation.  Instead, it brutishly castigated his politics.

It was a travesty that Buttigieg lasted as long as he did.  And it's a sad day for the American Democrat party when the best it can offer the American people is someone sold as distinguished merely by virtue of his choice of bedmate.